He gave it all up to join the Marines. On Nov. 16, at 26, he was killed in Iraq.

President Bush singled out McGlothlin's life story Wednesday, calling him a symbol of "the greatest force for freedom in human history," a man who "felt a special obligation to step up because he had been given so much."

The young first lieutenant was an interesting choice for the president's speechwriting team. When White House speechwriters contacted his parents Monday, asking for permission to mention him, they were told that Ryan hadn't voted for Bush in either 2000 or 2004.

But, Donald and Ruth McGlothlin said, they told the White House that the president could use their son's story -- as long as it wasn't reduced to a sound bite or taken out of context. And they vetted the words that the president delivered.

"My son told us, to our faces, 'I won't vote for Mr. Bush, but I'll take a bullet for him,' " Donald McGlothlin said Wednesday.

DRAWN TO MILITARY

Valedictorian of his high school class, Ryan, the youngest of three boys, was drawn to the military from childhood.

"He liked to play GI soldier, and he looked up uniforms and weaponry in the encyclopedia," recalled his mother, a counselor at Lebanon High School in Lebanon, in Southwestern Virginia.

He won an Army ROTC scholarship for his last three years of college, but it was withdrawn after recruiters learned that he had had a certain respiratory illness as a child. His mother said Ryan then worked even harder, training his muscles and his mind, to convince the military that he was healthy. And he set his sights on the Marine Corps.

Only two years into his doctoral program, after winning a medical waiver for his childhood wheezing, he left Stanford for Marine Corps Officer Candidate School. There, his mother proudly noted, he was the honor graduate in his class of 220 second lieutenants. "As a Marine, he found his niche," she said.

His father said Ryan was "livid" about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks -- "just furious that someone had attacked American citizens on our soil." Initially, he said, Ryan thought that the United States should have focused its attention on rooting out al-Qaida in Afghanistan -- "cutting off the head of the beast and disabling the beast's ability to come back."

But after arriving in Iraq, Ryan became convinced that the fight had to be won there. In a letter he wrote five days before his death -- and received by his family after his funeral -- he wrote:

"I know this war is not the most popular one back home, but people must understand that to pull out before the Iraqi army is fully ready to assume responsibility for the security of their own country is not only irresponsible of us but would ensure the persistence of terrorism."

"If you walk through these cities and see how terrified the Iraqi citizens are of the terrorists and how thankful they are that we finally came to their cities, you could not possibly consider doing this job incompletely," he wrote.

In giving the White House permission to use Ryan as an example, his father said, "we wanted to be sure Ryan's thoughts were communicated to as many people as might listen."

Like his own father, a legislator in Virginia for 22 years, Donald McGlothlin is a Democrat.

But he said that what Bush is saying now about staying the course in Iraq "is what we need to do."

McGlothlin remembers the last time the two took a trip together. Ryan was at Officer Candidate School at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, and father and son drove to Washington to visit the capital's landmarks.

"We went to every memorial. ... He read every inscription," said Donald McGlothlin. "He had a deep reverence for the sacrifices."

Ryan McGlothlin was buried in Lebanon, Va., posthumously promoted to first lieutenant and awarded the Purple Heart.

AMONG BEST STUDENTS

One of McGlothlin's chemistry professors said in November that he hoped McGlothlin would pick a career in chemistry, instead of the Marines. "It was a very unpleasant shock," said Richard Kiefer, who learned about McGlothlin's death from a colleague.

Before McGlothlin graduated, Kiefer and other chemistry professors urged him to focus on graduate school. Kiefer said McGlothlin was one of the three best students he'd had in his 40-year career.

"I think my body language and facial expressions probably told him that I didn't think it (the Marines) was a good idea," Kiefer said. "I encouraged him to go to graduate school and wrote recommendations for him."

But McGlothlin ultimately was drawn to the Marines.

McGlothlin seemed somewhat reluctant about attending Stanford, Kiefer said. He later e-mailed Kiefer about joining the Marines. "I e-mailed him back and wished him well," Kiefer said.

The two once worked together on a NASA Langley Research Center project that was aimed at learning how habitats could be built on the moon and Mars from the surface material on each celestial body.

"We mixed some simulated material with polyethylene in a heated press to make small bricks, and he did tests on them to see how they'd stand up to heat and pressure," Kiefer said.

McGlothlin was outgoing, Kiefer said, and got along well with others.

"He was a very excellent student. He was a very mature person. Even as an undergraduate, Ryan always seemed one step ahead of everyone, including his own professor," Kiefer said in November in a statement released by William and Mary.

Sam Sadler, William and Mary's vice president for student affairs, said in November that McGlothlin's death brought the war closer to everyone who knew him.

He said, "Ryan's death reminds us that, though war and danger may sometimes seem far away, they are yet near.

"Sadly, the promising life of a very special young man ended prematurely," Sadler said.